To all the oldsters who say that kids these days are spoiled for refusing to pay for music, I say "bah!" Free, legal music has existed foreveror at least since the invention of the radioand you folks had good radio stations and programs to listen to, back in the pre-Clear Channel era.

These days, a good radio station is hard to come by and CDs are $20 a pop. So, what's a music lover to do? Turn to the Internet, of course, where you can find music-streaming services that are not only free and legal (like all radio) but customizable.

There are plenty of services out there that offer either loose customization or full-blown playlist building. Services like Pandora, Slacker, and Jango let you enter the name of an artist or artists and listen to a stream of songs tailored specifically to your tastes. Other music sites like BoomShuffle and finetune allow you to pick the actual songs you'll hear; once you've added X number of songs, your playlist is treated as a full-fledged Web radio station and you can listen to it as often as you like, pass it around the Web, and embed it on a blog or social network.

As with anything free, there are some caveats. In order to get the blessing of the music industry, these music sites can't just let you play any old song you want, whenever you want. The playlists you build and the streams you customize need to be considered Web radio stations. Here are some of the conditions that have to be met to be considered Web radio:

Any playlist you build must include songs from at least 15 different artists

The playlist order is randomized

The listener can only skip a certain number of songs per listening session

The sitenot the usermust make royalty payments

These are minor hang-upsafter all, the payoff is that you get to listen to free music legallybut they're worth mentioning.

These sites are a perfect match for a certain type of music listener: the kind who wants a little more control than typical Web radio affords, but who also wants to listen to new music that might not be in his or her iTunes folder. They're also perfect for office workers who can't store their personal music libraries on work machines but go crazy in their cubicles without tunes.

Even better, they're all free, and you won't get sued for using any of them. So what are you waiting for?

Jangowww.jango.com
Start by typing in an artist's name, and Jango will spit out a streaming "station" based on that artist. Fine-tune the station by adding more bands, rating songs, and so on. Jango also has a social-networking component built in, akin to Last.fm'syou can send messages to other users, find other stations you might like (Jango will point you to them), and add or make friends.

TheSixtyOnewww.thesixtyone.com
TheSixtyOne is heavily focused on undiscovered artists and songs, and it asks a bit more of the user than just passively listening. When you hear a song you like, you "bump" it (give it a favorable rating) to move it up the list, similar to how Digg works. The good songs float to the top, and when you bump songs that go on to become popular, your bumping power increases. Music pioneers can dig into the site and take chances on new additions, while the less-brave souls can stick to proven tunes that have already floated up to the top. Either way, you'll be hearing undiscovered stuff.

Continue on to the slideshow to check out the rest of our favorite free music services, including Musicovery, BoomShuffle, finetune, last.fm, Pandora, Slacker, Skreemr, Songza, MySpace, and imeem. We've also included a legally gray bonus tip at the end of the slideshow, brought to you by AppScout.com. Enjoy!

Kyle Monson is the Senior Editor for PCMag.com. He oversees and edits PCMag.com’s home page and product news coverage, and helps out with site maintenance and editing. He also oversees feature projects like the Top 100 Web Sites, and writes reviews and news stories.
Kyle is the Founding Editor of AppScout, a PCMag.com-affiliated blog covering software and Web applications.
Before joining the PC Magazine staff, Kyle wrote for Newsweek and several daily newspapers. He has a BA in Communications (Print Journalism) from Brigham Young University.
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